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Copyright, 1928, by 
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WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


By 


E. JAY WOHLGEMUTH 


The Place of Cincinnati in the Life of 


STEPHEN CoLuins Foster 


PAPER READ BEFORE 
THE LITERARY CLUB 
OF CINCINNATI 


THE ROUGH NOTES PRESS 
INDIANAPOLIS 
1928 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


T was the year 1847 down on the Public Landing 
in Cincinnati. All was bustle and excitement as 
the steam whistle of the big Pittsburgh packet shot 
out the signal of her approach and she appeared 
around the bend. Stevedores and roustabouts, white 
and black, busily engaged in unloading the cargoes 
of the steamboats that lined the water’s edge, over 
the rude gangways, paused in their work to watch 
her as she neared the bank and cast out her “stages.” 


A young man, slender and handsome, with reg- 
ular and striking features and his eyes shining with 
eagerness, stood in the throng and as her passengers 
hurried ashore he grasped one of them, a youth of 
his own age, by the arm and, hardly waiting for the 
exchange of greetings, exclaimed: “Billy, I’ve got a 
dandy new one; let’s go up to the store and try it.” 
They climbed the steep bank and entered the office 
of Irwin & Foster, in old Cassilly’s Row; then, tak- 
ing down his flute, the youth played for the first 
time to an auditor, the sweet strains of the serenade, 
“Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming.” 


The young man was Stephen Collins Foster, the 
author of “Old Folks at Home,” “Old Black Joe,” 


[3] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


“My Old Kentucky Home,” and many other of the 
best known American native songs, whose title as 
“the world’s greatest song-writer” is finding accept- 
ance as the true measure of his achievement is recog- 
nized and he fits into his place in American race 
and folk history and literature. 


This story of the origin of “Come Where My 
Love Lies Dreaming” was related to the writer in 
Pittsburgh by a friend of “Billy” Hamilton, Foster's 
life-long friend, who had it from Hamilton’s own 
lips before he died; Hamilton having been a member 
of the quartette in Pittsburgh who first sang many 
of the songs produced by Foster both before and 
after he began to write professionally for Christy's 
Minstrels and his publishers. * 


And he further related that that same night in 
Cincinnati they hastily improvised a quartette and 
went out to the homes of their friends in the city, 
where they produced the new serenade so success- 
fully and were regaled and rewarded so generously, 
that when they returned to spend the remainder of 
the night on the boat they were scarcely able to help 
one another over the gangway and into their berths. 


Cincinnati’s place in the life of Stephen Foster is 


*I give this story as it was related to me, without investigation of 
other versions as to how and where the serenade was written. 


[4] 


Wert ttiN THREE CHORDS 


a large one but it has not been recognized either by 
Cincinnatians or in the few fragmentary sketches 
and biographies that have been written of his life. 
He was born in Pittsburgh, lived in Cincinnati from 
his twentieth to his twenty-third year, and died in 
New York when not yet thirty-eight years old. His 
work was done within a comparatively few years. 
Besides his actual residence for three years here 
during the impressionable and formative period of 
his life, he made a number of trips to Cincinnati 
and as far as New Orleans on his brother’s steam- 
ers. Many of his inspired native songs and planta- 
tion melodies, which comprise the largest collection 
of “immortals” that may be credited to a single 
author, show the influence of the Cincinnati period 
of his life. It was a Pittsburgh, not a Cincinnati 
writer who said in the Gazette-Times of October 
18, 1914, that Foster, “although born in Pittsburgh, 
belonged to the middle west of the country border- 
ing the Ohio River, where he spent most of his time.” 


While this may be an exaggeration, it may be said 
that Cincinnati was the place where his genius came 
to bud, where many of his impressions were formed 
and that to a large extent this city furnished the 
environment which not only made Foster, but the 


Lou 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


whole school of native songs which he founded, 
possible. 


Stephen Foster's life outwardly was uneventful. 
He was born July 4, 1826, came to Cincinnati from 
his home in Pittsburgh in the year 1846, at the age 
of 20, to work in his brother Dunning’s office on 
Front street. He remained here three years, returned 
to Pittsburgh in 1849, married in 1850 Miss Jane 
McDowell, daughter of a prominent surgeon there, 
and moved the next year to New York to be near 
his publishers. He remained there a short time and 
returned to Pittsburgh, where in a little home in 
Allegheny he wrote many of his songs. In 1860 he 
returned to New York where he died January 13, 
1864, in an obscure hotel where he had been living, . 
alone and forsaken by his family and friends. He 
died, in fact, as a result of a cut in his face from an 
ice-pitcher received while attempting to dress him- 
self when in a weakened condition; he swooned and 
his face struck against the pitcher, cutting a small 
artery, from which he bled to death. 


He produced altogether 175 songs. Some besides 
those already mentioned are: ““Massa’s in the Cold 
Ground”; the great Civil War song, “We Are 
Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thov- 
sand More”; “Old Dog Tray”; “Uncle Ned”; 


[6] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


“There’s a Good Time Coming”; “Hard Times 
Come Again No More’’; “Nellie Bly”; Nelly Wasa 
Lady”; “Camptown Races”; “Louis’ana Belle”; 
“Beautiful Dreamer”; “I See Her Still in My 
Dreams’; ““When This Dreadful War Is Ended,” a 
popular Civil War song; “Willie, We Have Missed 
You,” of which 150,000 were sold up to 1880; and 
“Laura Lee.” 


[7 ] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


N the Forties the Public Landing was the most 
conspicuous and important center of the city. 
The firm of Irwin & Foster were steamboat agents 
and commission merchants, at first located at No. 4 
Cassilly’s Row and afterwards at 22 Broadway, be- 
tween Pearl and Second streets. A picture in Dr. 
Goss’s history shows this old row, which in later 
years was known as “Rat Row.” But in Foster's 
time it was the pick of locations, especially for a 
river business. There were sixteen steamboat and 
commission agencies listed in the city directory of 
1846 and they were nearly all in this section. Old 
residents no doubt recall this row of buildings which 
was torn down some years ago to make way for the 
L. & N. railroad tracks. Only the rear of the row 
was on East Front street, but the offices and stores 
extended through from the real front, which was 
known as Giffin street. These stores were four 
stories high on the river side and three stories high 
on the Front street side. Number Four was pre- 
sumably the fourth store from the corner of Front 
and Broadway. 


The river front of course presented the most 
lively and varied appearance imaginable. From 


[8 ] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


Main to Walnut it used to be known as Gilmour’s 
Landing and from Broadway to Ludlow it was 
Wiggins’ Landing. The Public Landing was be- 
tween. There were no wharfboats, but “stages” 
were rigged and thrown out from the boats to the 
shore to form a gangway. 


The Directory of 1849 lists the firm of C. & W. 
Cassilly as commission merchants at the corner of 
Broadway and Front streets. Morrison Foster in 
his biography of his brother has this paragraph: 
“While in Cincinnati he met Miss Sophie Marshall, 
the grand-daughter of Michael P. Cassilly of that 
city, a former Pittsburgher, who was an old friend 
of our family. Miss Marshall possessed a beautiful 
soprano voice and sang with much grace.” Wil- 
liams’ Directory of 1849-50 shows Michael P. Cas- 
silly as living on the west side of Broadway between 
Third and Fourth in a building next to the present 
University Club. Stephen Foster himself lived 
around the corner on Fourth street with his brother 
Dunning M., and both boarded at Mrs. Jane Grif- 
fin’s on the south side of Fourth street between 
Broadway and Ludlow, probably where the Guil- 
ford School now stands. The directory of 1846 
does not show the name of Stephen Foster but it 
shows that of his brother and also the firm of Irwin 


[9] 


% 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


and Foster. It shows that Dunning M. Foster 
boarded at the Broadway Hotel at the corner of 
Broadway and Second street. Mrs. J. Griffin in 
1846 conducted a boarding house at the corner of 
McAllister and Fourth streets. Evidently she later 
moved across the street for at the time Stephen and 
Dunning Foster boarded with her, her address is 
given as on the south side of Fourth street. 


Morrison Foster says, speaking of 1846, “There 
was then in Cincinnati in the music business, W. C. 
Peters, whom Stephen had known in Pittsburgh, 
and who had taught music in our family.” W. C. 
Peters published “Oh, Susanna,” “Way Down 
South” and “Uncle Ned” or “Old Uncle Ned,” the 
fame of which songs went around the world and 
both of which were written in Cincinnati. The 
1846 directory shows the firm of Peters & Com- 
pany, music store, on the south side of Fourth 
street, between Main and Sycamore. The directory 
of 1849 shows the firm of Peters, Field & Company, 
pianos and music, 12th and Walnut streets. The 
directory of 1851 shows the firm as William C. 
Peters & Son, William C., William M. and Alfred 
C. Peters, music, pianos and musical merchandise, 
Melodian Building, corner Fourth and Walnut. 


The record of the firm of Irwin & Foster is inter- 


[ 10] 


MNottIN THREE CHORDS 


esting in this connection. Archibald R. Irwin was 
in the steamboat business for himself in 1843 on 
Broadway between Front and Second streets. When 
he went into partnership with Dunning M. Foster 
in 1845, the office was moved into Cassilly’s Row. 
In 1849 appeared a correction in the addenda of the 
directory showing that Irwin & Foster, although 
given in the body of the directory as at 4 Cassilly’s 
Row, had removed their office to 22 Broadway, 
between Front and Second streets. In the directory 
of 1851 all trace of the Fosters had disappeared. 
That directory shows the firm of Archibald Irwin, 
Jr. & Company, commission and forwarding mer: 
chants and steamboat agents, 22 Broadway. 


{11 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


INCINNATI divides with her sister river city 

of Pittsburgh the distinction of developing not 
only Stephen Foster but negro minstrelsy as well. 
There is a peculiar interweaving of the threads that 
go into the making of negro minstrelsy and native 
song writing in the early western environments of 
these two cities which, connected by the Ohio River, 
were the centers of the inland empire of America 
in the forties and fifties when Foster lived among us. 


It was the publication of “Old Folks at Home,” 
“Old Uncle Ned,” “Way Down South” and “Oh, 
Susanna” by a Cincinnati publisher, W. C. Peters, 
who had formerly taught music in the Foster family 
in Pittsburgh, which caused him to give up the 
thought of continuing in business and to become a 
song writer. Incidentally, the success of his songs 
published by Mr. Peters enabled the latter to estab 
lish in Cincinnati one of the large musical publishing 
house of the west. 


Sixteen years previously to Foster’s coming to 
Cincinnati, the actor, W. D. Rice, who is credited 
with founding the school of negro minstrelsy, had 
picked up the song, “Jim Crow,” which he first 
heard sung on the streets in Cincinnati by a negro 


[ 12 } 


WHDHIN THREE CHORDS 


wagon driver and which he later produced at the 
old Pittsburgh theatre on Fifth street in Pittsburgh, 
now rebuilt, but then a rude structure of boards. 
This same W. C. Peters, then a composer, pub 
lisher and music dealer on Market street in Pitts- 
burgh, helped Rice whip “Jim Crow” into shape 
and furnished the pianoforte accompaniment for the 
song just as it has been published down to the pres- 
ent time. Peters is thus connected not only with the 
beginning of negro minstrelsy with Rice but his pay- 
ment of $100 to Foster for “Oh, Susanna” deter- 
mined Foster to follow his bent and embark on his 
song-writing career. 


It was while Foster was in Cincinnati that a Mr. 
Andrews of Pittsburgh, who conducted a music hall 
there, offered a prize of a silver cup for the best 
orginal negro song and his brother Morrison sent to 
Stephen a copy of the advertisement urging him to 
become a competitor. Foster sent from Cincinnati 
“Way Down South” and while this did not win 
the cup it was favorably received and gave the timid 
Foster encouragement to go on. 


The presidential campaigns of the forties were 
distinguished by political song singing. A writer on 
the period says: “Clubs for that purpose were or- 
ganized in nearly all the cities and towns and ham- 


[ 13 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


lets—clubs for the platform, clubs for the street, 
clubs for the parlor, Whig clubs and Democratic 
clubs. Ballads innumerable to airs indefinite, new 
and old, filled the land—Irish ballads, German bal- 
lads, Yankee ballads but preferred over all, negro 
ballads.” 


Young Foster, with all this ringing in his ears, his 
own songs rising out of his heart, awakened to the 
creative impulse and germinated in this rich soil. 
In 1849 he returned to Pittsburgh and joined his 
old circle. The negro airs were still the favorites 
with his quartette as with other singers but became 
so worn that Foster offered to write one himself. 
His success was such that he brought to life his 
patriotic specimens produced in Cincinnati, and 
sung to a moderate degree in the drawing rooms of 
Cincinnati. Doubtless Foster’s friends from Pitts- 
burgh who had frequently visited Cincinnati, or 
whom he joined for a trip on the palatial river boats, 
had taken part in the singing of these songs. His 
future wife, whom he had met for the first time in 
Cincinnati, may have helped to sing them there. If 
Pittsburgh was his native place it was to Cincinnati 
and the life and environment of which it was the 
center that he went for his inspiration. In that sense 
we may claim Foster as our own, as Pittsburgh was 


[ 14 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


too far from the life of the west to give him much of 
this first inspiration. In Cincinnati, he was in the 
midst of it, his ofice work on the river front, his 
home but two blocks away, his business that of 
steamboating. His daughter told the writer that he 
once said that the happiest years of his life were 
those spent in Cincinnati; it may be some satisfac- 
tion to us that Cincinnati contributed to his happi- 
ness and not to the misery which clouded his later 
life. 


It is a great thing for the millions who love his 
songs that Stephen Foster was not born into a strati- 
fied or static society but in a period of the west’s 
history when society was yet in the making; he was 
not born too late to miss the freshness, variety and 
bloom of life in a forming and richly human and ele- 
mental society. He came into this wohder country 
of river life, of western energy and southern ro- 
mance, a stripling of 20 whose naturally diffident 
and timid nature made him still less conspicuous 
than his position as a bookkeeper for one of the 
numerous shipping firms of the town warranted. 
And he took it all in from the greatest vantage-point 
that could be conceived, old Rat Row, overhanging 
the river’s edge. He spent much of his time on the 
levee listening to the darkies singing as they loaded 


[15 ] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


and unloaded the cargoes from the river craft. He 
never lived among the negroes, but from his north- 
ern home in Pittsburgh and his bookkeeper’s desk in 
Cincinnati he drew song pictures of their poetic life 
with such insight that had he been a mere prose- 
writer his master-pen would have depicted life 
among the lowly as truly and as greatly as did Har- 
riet Beecher Stowe, his contemporary in Cincinnati 
while he was here. | 


I wish that I might picture our young poet as he 
sat keeping accounts in his brother Dunning’s office 
in those early days. His brother Morrison, in his 
sketch of him, says that some of the books still pre- 
served which he kept show evidence of the greatest 
diligence and care, but no doubt his poet’s eye many 
times strayed from its task to the picturesque land- 
ing and river before him with the Kentucky hills in 
the distance. 


There he sat over his tedious bookkeeping, vision- 
ing the music and lights at night on the great boats 
as they chugged their way towards the south, the 
land of his dreams; a world of plantations and 
bayous, of darkies and their banjoes, singing their 
plantation songs of their loves and their woes, their 
burdens and their chains. It is easy to picture the 
effect of the contrast, in the mind of this imagina- 


[ 16 } 


MWeerriN FHREE CHORDS 


tive, repressed lad from stern Calvinistic stock, 
intensely practical and freedom-loving, which South- 
ern life presented, with the life of the “western 
Puritans,” as they have been called, to which he 
had been accustomed in Pittsburgh. And we can 
well understand how in Cincinnati he could write 
the rollicking song, “Way Down South Whar de 
Corn Grows,” and when the cruel realities of life 
had killed his hopes one by one, in later days, he 
wrote the song “I Cannot Sing Tonight.” He was 
perhaps thinking of the old happy days in Cincin- 
nati, after the shadows of despair had cast their 
wings of impenetrable darkness over the dreams of a 
poor genius whose best claim during his life to the 
favor of the world and his friends was that he was a 
writer of popular and ephemeral ditties and planta- 
tion melodies. 


Foster’s life was spent and historical interest cen- 
ters in the three cities of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and 
New York. It was the writer’s privilege a few 
months ago to spend an entire day and evening in 
Pittsburgh—when he secured or verified much of 
the data here presented. He went to the Foster 
homestead; talked with his daughter and grandson; 
visited the Carnegie Library and went through the 
newspaper clippings and other references there on 


fin) 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


file; and had a pleasant hour with Erasmus Wilson, 
the veteran river editor of the Gazette-Times, who 
was the local authority on Foster and who knew 
intimately “Billy” Hamilton, the life-long friend of 
Foster, as well as many of the Foster circle, includ- 
ing his wife. 


{ 18 | 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


ie delving into the past of our cities, we find 
always traces of the settler, battling with the 
rude conditions of frontier life. Colonel William B. 
Foster, father of Stephen, was one of these early 
pioneers, and a man of parts. Foster’s early environ- 
ment consisted of the best home and religious in- 
fluences of those sturdy days. After he was dead 
and his fame began to come home to Pittsburgh his 
brother and his daughter divided the honors of act- 
ing before the public as the executor of his literary 
remains. His brother wrote the book which his 
great-grand-children have sold on the streets and in 
the office buildings of Pittsburgh as a means of mak- 
ing a livelihood. 


The home is practically neglected, as the spas- 
modic interest of the council of aldermen and the 
maintenance of an attendant paid for by the city 
represents’ about all the public interest that is dis- 
played in the great song-poet, except for the occa- 
sional visitor. Foster’s granddaughter, who was 
reared in the home of his wife, Mrs. Matthew B. 
Wiley, who after his death married again, with her 
husband and children consented to live in the old 


[19 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


Foster homestead where Stephen was born, as cus 
todians, but gave up the labor of love and moved 
into a house of her own. The home is now occu- 
pied by the only daughter, Mrs. Marion Foster 
Welsh, a widow, and her son. The large room at 
the right as you go in is the relic room. 


We went into the relic room and found the 
“guard.” The exhibit of relics was pitifully small; 
there was the piano donated by Mrs. Mary Kellar 
Woods. There is a tradition in the family that Fos- 
ter composed more of his songs on the Woods piano 
than on his own. It is one of the two pianos im- 
ported from Germany in 1849, the first pianos that 
_ found their way west of the Alleghenies. There was 
an oil painting on the wall of Colonel William B. 
Foster, another of Stephen Foster and a third of 
Dunning M. Foster, which was the most interesting 
of the collection to me, since it was Dunning who 
brought Stephen to Cincinnati. The Foster Memo- 
rial Home was opened to the public in 1915. Previ- 
ously, it had been a boarding house. An attempt 
was made to get the Carnegie Museum to release 
the Foster Piano to be placed in the Foster home, 
but the donor, a gentleman now living in Boston, 
objected on the ground that if moved there it might 
be destroyed by fire. 


[ 20 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


The last surviving member of the Stephen Foster 
quartette, Mrs. Susan B. Robinson, who died Jan- 
uary 31, 1916, at the age of 85, was one of the last 
links connecting Foster with the present. Before her 
marriage she had been Miss Sue Pentland, famous as 
a beauty and soprano, and it was to her that Foster 
dedicated his first success, “Open Thy Lattice, 
Love.” When Mrs. Robinson died, her son prom- 
ised that the flute and other mementos including 
some original Foster manuscripts would, in accord- 
ance with her wishes, be placed in the Foster Memo 
rial Home, but it appears that this was not done. 
Even at an advanced age, Mrs. Robinson enjoyed 
humming the beautiful ballads which Foster had 
composed at her mother’s piano. Probably one rea- 
son why there are no more relics in the Foster home 
is that there are very few extant even in the homes 
of the Foster family circle. On the Northside in 
Allegheny where he lived his home was a very sim- 
ple one and is now torn down. There are few 
mementos of Foster that came from it. 


Mrs. Welsh gave one of the Pittsburgh papers an 
interview at the time that funds for the Foster 
Memorial Home were being subscribed. She lived 
with her father and mother while they were in New 
York together and although quite young has recol- 


[21] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


lections of that time. He died when she was 12 
years old. She says of him, “My father was a very 
sensitive man and when he went to New York to 
stay he died there of a broken heart. It was ill treat- 
ment of this world that ended his life when he was 
37 years old. He was a tender-hearted man and 
always saw deeply into the hearts of others. His 
plantation songs came purely from the heart. He 
thought that they might help the colored race. The 
simple methods were not accidental interpretations, 
but were original ideas that represented deep and 
arduous study and analysis of harmonies. He 
worked all day long at his desk. He was no business 
man, he would give away anything his friends ad- 
mired. He was a dreamer and no one understands 
a dreamer.” 


The old friends and the old Pittsburgh are gone; 
a modern industrial city has taken its place. Pitts- 
burgh has awakened to the importance of Stephen 
Foster but the interest now aroused has become a 
historical one only. Foster was not any part of the 
present Pittsburgh. The older Pittsburgh people 
hold with a pathetic grasp to the simple old life now 
overwhelmed by the rush of the great steel center. 
And yet a Pittsburgh business man said to me: 


[ 22 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


“Foster's songs have done more good for the world 
than either Carnegie or Westinghouse.” 


A clerk in the library stated that requests for 
information about Foster were constantly growing 
in number and only a short time before my call had 
gotten everything possible together regarding him. 


{23} 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


ILL NYE said of James Whitcomb Riley that 
when they were traveling together Riley would 
sometimes go up to his room in the hotel, lock the 
door and refuse admittance to anyone, not even 
receiving food,—unless a bottle of whiskey be con- 
sidered food. Riley would emerge several hours or 
a day later exclaiming in a joyful voice, “I’ve got a 
new one,” and be as proud as a hen with a new- 


laid egg. 


Foster’s method was more profound and less hap- 
hazard. His wife has related to friends the method 
by which he appeared to work out his melodies. He 
would sit for hours at his piano, deeply absorbed in 
his mood, his thoughts in another world, now run- 
ning his fingers over the keys, now striking a single 
chord and holding it, listening in his abstracted 
manner, then trying out perhaps a few notes or an 
entire little melody; always seeming to be groping 
and feeling for the angel music which he heard faint 
and far away and striving to catch and hold it. He 
would sit thus at the piano until he seemed to have 
exhausted his mood and then he would come out 
from his abstraction and would be irritated if any- 
one touched the piano or if he had even to look at it. 


[ 24 ] 


Mt HIN THREE CHORDS 


Perhaps he would then pick up his flute and go 
through the same process; and after he had exhaust- 
ed his second mood with the flute he would likely 
as not pick up his hat, pass out, and would be gone 
for the day. 


So far as the known incidents and events of his 
life go, his life-current apparently ran along as 
smoothly as one of his own songs, and as simply, 
except for his fatal habit. Was there in his life an 
unsolved mystery, some hidden tragedy, as difficult 
to fathom, as it is to understand what there is in 
these almost absurd little pieces of his that touch the 
heart of the world and open doors that are closed 
to the great masters? His songs are as soothing 
as the water bubbling out of a spring, a mother’s 
croonings to her babe, or the song of the sea to the 
heart of the mariner. Foster “struck twelve” not 
once as did other writers, but a dozen times, and 
must be given the laurel of genius for his production 
of matchless melodies which came to him as to no 
other man in his field of artistic expression. 


Although there is another version of the origin of 
the song, “Massa’s In The Cold Ground,” here is 
the one given in a Pittsburgh paper: “It was written 
in 1852. It was suggested by a scene in Covington, 
Kentucky, when Foster was in Cincinnati. A num- 


[25 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


ber of slaves whose master had died huddled together 
weeping for the death of “Massa” and looking fear- 
fully into the future, where they might not find so 
kind an owner, and be separated by purchase of 
various members of the party by different slave 
holders.” Another version of the origin of this song 
was given me by Mr. Erasmus Wilson. He said 
that Foster’s father had about the place an old 
southern darkey called “Joe.” When his master 
died he was very forlorn, and went about the place 
moaning and crooning to himself, “Ole Mass’s gone; 
Mass’s in the cold, cold ground; won't see Massa no 
more.” Foster, with whom this old darkey used to 
_ play and ride about upon his back, was quick to 
seize upon it as a cue for the words of a song. This 
same darkey is credited likewise with furnishing the 
suggestion for the great song “Old Black Joe.” As 
Joe grew old he began to think and dream of the 
future life and of his own best days spent in the 
south. He was deeply religious as well as supersti- 
tious and he would go about muttering and talking 
to himself: “I hear those angel voices callin’, I hear 
ole massa callin’ and ’se comin—I’se comin’.” This 
old negro “Joe” and a mulatto girl who used to take 
Foster as a child to the Methodist church song 
meetings conducted for members of her race are 


[ 26 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


credited in Pittsburgh with having been the inspira- 
tion for his negro melodies, but whatever the occa- 
sion I prefer to think that their true setting was in 
the glorious free west of the forties; that in the rush- 
ing tide of pioneer life westward it was his splendid 
privilege to give to the world the immortal native 
songs of a land in the highest tide of its fresh and 
youthful impulses, best typified in this period by a 
retiring youth, who enjoyed not the popular acclaim 
and who sacrificed his family life, his business career, 
and finally his own life to his unconquerable impulse 
to write “harmless and smooth running little rhymes 
and melodies.” 


This is what the austere and condescending mu- 
sical critics like to call them. They accord to Foster 
a certain archness and humor, even a degree of re- 
finement, not common to his “school”; mostly they 
treat him in a flippant manner, as one beneath their 
serious notice. Nowhere is to be found a dignified 
criticism of the work of the man who, in any true 
estimate of our precious store of American music, 
traditions and native sentiments—our folk lore and 
race history—stands out as Shakespeare among the 
Elizabethans. The critics have assumed that because 
Foster’s lyrics are easy to sing they were easy to 
produce and are simple musically, because elemental. 


[27 ] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


A composer assures me that the contrary is the case, 
that “Old Folks at Home,” for instance, may be 
sung as ragtime or a funeral dirge or may be ex- 
panded into grand opera; that, in short, though it 
may be produced “‘within three chords” of the keys 
it is a great musical composition. Not being able to 
quote a satisfactory analysis of the qualities that 
make Foster’s work enduring and great, may I in- 
flict upon you a specimen of the criticisms usually 
found: 


‘Folk-songs act through the heart; whatever 
brains they have are vaporous. You know the trans 
parent melodies, simple and unobtrusive harmony, 
the close marriage of words and tones, the ease with 
which one sits back and listens, the whole working 
without your assistance; this covers Stephen Foster's 
style. His subject was scarcely new; the style cer- 
tainly and essentially from the entity of peoples— 
and surely a folk-song composer was always on the 
level of ‘the people.’ Our knowledge of the spon- 
taneity of writers like Foster must not blind us to 
the limitations which an unstudied point of view 
imposed upon them. We may suffer from fluency 
quite as much as from slowness. There is no special 
virtue in fluency except that it does not look like 
work. Foster was fluent; had the easy-going, non- 


[28 ] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


revolutionary tendency of the fluent. But it is cer- 
tain that the facile ‘folk’ idea germinates immediate 
interpreters of our folk spirit who have a pre- 
mortem success. 


This may describe the ordinary popular song 
writer but it certainly does not describe or account 
for Foster. 

We get a better view of Stephen Foster’s emi- 
nence in his own field when we compare him, not 
with the writers who have produced popular, 
ephemeral songs, for there is no comparison, but 
with other writers of songs that compare with his 
in quality. 


Most of our imperishable native and home songs 
were written for the stage, or for the minstrels. 
“Home, Sweet Home,” by John Howard Payne, is 
the most widely known of these great songs, with 
‘“Swanee River” by Foster a close second. It was 
written for the stage and first sung in London in 
1823, three years before Stephen Foster was born. 
Payne wrote only the words, not the music, and 
with the exception of this one song everything he 
did has passed into oblivion; yet until recently he 
has been much better known and more greatly ad- 
vertised than Foster, who produced both words and 
melody of a dozen or more songs that live. The 


[ 29 ] 


WITHIN, THREE CHORD: 


little cottage in Easthampton, Long Island, Payne’s 
boyhood home, is one of the landmarks of the island 
and is preserved with reverence and loving care. 
Foster wrote both words and music of nearly all his 
songs with a touch and instinct so sure and pro- 
found that they have been accepted as the model 
and inspiration for hundreds of other songs both as 
to words and music which have formed in large ~ 
measure our popular musical taste, but which like 
all imitations have found their way into oblivion. 


Which is the greater, the song—the words—or 
the soul of the song—the music? Payne was much 
incensed because an attempt was made to take the 
credit from him and give it to Bishop, who wrote 
the music of ““Home, Sweet Home,” or as some say, 
adapted it from an old Sicilian air. Credit has gen- 
erally been accorded to Payne because it was pointed 
out that the melody had been tried with other words 
and had not been a success. He wrote them and 
fitted them to the melody. There have been hun- 
dreds of thousands of popular and sentimental songs 
produced but fewer than a hundred have lived. We 
can have little patience with those who would refer 
to such songs as Payne’s and Foster’s as “simple 
little pieces making the elementary appeal,” and 
term them common-place and mediocre. All truly 


[ 30 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


great men and things are simple like Foster and his 
songs, and like them, deeply profound. When John 
Howard Payne fitted the words of “Home Sweet 
Home” to that old Sicilian air he struck the one 
chord within his own nature that was great; and he 
never struck it again. 


_ Such songs are like diamonds in a heap of gravel 
stones; they are not thereby to be considered gravel 
stones but still remain diamonds. And Stephen 
Foster’s diamonds will always shine out in the great 
wagon-load of popular songs that have long since 
been trampled under foot. The greatest writers, the 
Grimms, Anderson and other delvers into folk-lore, 
have not thought it beneath them to devote their 
lives merely to bringing to light the folk-lore and 
folk-songs of their native land; they sought for them 
as the diver for pearls. We have before us the life 
of a man who created the greatest of native songs in 
America, who left to us a glorious heritage of imper- 
ishable sentiment and melody—songs that are not 
even race songs, but are universal—who produced 
the purest gems with the instinct and ease of a mas- 
ter, while others even among the greatest in the field 
labored long in the production of a single master- 
piece. Critics have treated Foster much the same as 
Payne, Dan Emmett, who wrote “Dixie,” Thomas 


[31] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


Dunn English, the author of “Ben Bolt,” and the 
composers of ““The Star Spangled Banner,” “Yankee 
Doodle,” “John Brown’s Body” and other songs 
which were the result of a single flash but which 
never came again. The melody for “John Brown’s 
Body” was taken from Foster's “Ellen Bayne.” Dan 
Emmett was an old minstrel, who knew nothing of 
musical composition, who was the son of a black- 
smith and never had more than an elementary edu- 
cation. He belonged to the school of Dan Rice, of 
“Jim Crow” fame, and in fact Emmett traveled with 
Rice and possibly received from him the suggestion 
ot the negro minstrel song. Foster owed much to 
such men as Dan Rice and Emmett, but his creative 
genius expressed in his refined and beautiful musical 
pictures have little in common with these artists, 
fascinating as they are. 


It has been the fortune of some men to achieve 
greatness and immortal fame by reason of the wide 
ranges of their faculties through all the realms of 
human experience; they have fascinated and cap- 
- tured the admiration of their fellow men by sheer 
variety in the glittering array of their talents which 
they have spread out before us. Stephen Foster was 
not one of these; his life was spent as a centripedal, 
not as a centrifugal force. “Wéithin three chords” 


[ 32 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


he compressed all the meaning that life held for him. 
His was no superficial knowledge of the true in- 
wardness and meaning of life; had it been, his songs 
would have gone the way of thousands of ephemeral 
and popular pieces modeled after his style, but with- 
out the essential Foster quality. 


When Rostand died it was said of him that al- 
though a great artist and poet, he lacked the one 
quality of poetic genius, without which he might 
not hope for immortality. ““Not many may touch 
the hidden source of ‘tears of things’ and posterity 
will not reckon Rostand among these,” said this 
critic. Foster had eminently the gift and faculty of 
communicating sympathy, both through his words 
and music, because what he wrote he actually lived. 
He lived and experienced and expressed himself 
within three chords so deeply that his own life- 
chord—the major one—snapped at the age of 37. 


His songs, written in the forties and fifties, “carry 
on” in their influence in the songs written down to 
the present day. In each realm in which he wrote, 
whether in plantation melodies, sentimental lyrics or 
even war songs, the trace of his hand is seen. And 
no man has been more greatly plagiarized and also 
neglected by those who have profited from him than 
has Foster. Some time ago in the Literary Digest 


[ 33 ] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


appeared an article, “Two Wars in Song,” compar- 
ing the songs of the Great war with those of the 
Civil war. I quote: 


te 6 


Over There’ was surely the great song of this 
war, as ‘John Brown’s Body’ was of the other. 
George M. Cohan is entitled, not for the first time, 
to the credit of having his hand on the people’s 
pulse, of being a real interpreter of their moods. 
“The Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, and 
we won't come back till it’s over, over there,’ and 
the gay but threatening melody epitomized the 
whole struggle from the American viewpoint. In 
the earlier song he struck the national note, as 
George F. Root struck it in the old war with his 
‘Rally Round the Flag.’ Root, too, had his song of 
a single phase, “We are coming, Father Abraham, 
three hundred thousand more.’ We may call Cohan 
the Root of this war.” 


There are four songs mentioned in this paragraph. 
Two of them can be traced to Foster. The music — 
for “John Brown’s Body,” the great song of the 
Civil War, was taken from Foster’s “Ellen Bayne.” 
The other great Civil War song, “We are coming, 
Father Abraham,” belongs not to Root but to Foster. 


The quality of sympathy is not the only one that 
_makes Foster’s songs great; he has written pieces 


[ 34 ] 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


that live which are not characterized by the “gift of 
tears” and sympathy. 


It is related that when Herr Wilhelmj, the great 
violinist, reached New York in 1878, he went to a 
music store and asked if they had an arrangement 
of an American song which he though was called 
“Black Jack.” They did not know of any song by 
that title. Thereupon Herr Wilhelmj puckered up 
his lips and whistled a tune. “Ah!”, exclaimed the 
clerk, “he wants Old Black Joe.” His comment 
was, “If Americans know not this song, they are 
beasts.” In England, this song is sung today, but 
is know as “Poor Old Jeff.” 


The story is told of Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” 
that during the Civil war a northern regiment was 
so long delayed in being mustered out that most of 
the soldiers, in a state bordering on mutiny, broke 
through the sentry lines, made for a town near camp 
and at night returned in the condition of riotous 
inebriety when even the colonel was unable to con- 
trol them. The bandmaster called a few of his 
musicians together and in a few moments the strains 
of “Old Folks at Home” were heard above the 
shouts of the obstreperous soldiers. Within twenty 
minutes the half drunken crowd wept itself to sleep. 


[35 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS. 


OSTER did not originate negro minstrelsy, but 

his school of native songs and his own genius 
grew out of and were inspired by it. From it he 
learned the secret of approach to human sympathy 
through humor and drollery. Notwithstanding that 
he wrote many humorous pieces, there was little 
native humor in Foster; his natural creative mood 
was sensitive, refined and melancholy, not rollicking 
or humorous. But the open and free life about him, 
a period of Dutch, Irish, Yankee and negro singing, 
and above all his study of negro minstrelsy, from 
which his cultivated and finely attuned ear culled 
the few kernels of real melody, contributed the pop- 
ular element to a muse which, had it developed in 
another environment, would have appealed to a 
more limited circle of listeners. Foster watched the 
growth in popularity of negro minstrelsy with an 
eye to its possibilities for himself. And negro min- 
strelsy must be studied in connection with Foster 
because it contributed this great popular element to 
his songs. 


The birth and growth of negro minstrelsy in Cin- 
cinnati and the early west make also clear that the 
Cincinnati period was the fructifying time of his 


[ 36 | 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


genius. Foster’s native songs took the place and 
supplied the demand as nearly as possible in a coun- 
try settled as this one was, of the folk-songs of the 
older European countries. America was settled at 
the beginning by civilized people; what songs they 
had would necessarily have to be written ones. The 
European folk-songs were of course composed at a 
time when the common people did not read or 
write; so they had to be transmitted from one gen- 
eration to another by word of mouth. So true to 
nature and so perfect in their art and spontaneous 
in their expression of natural sentiment are Foster’s 
songs that critics have considered them as the near- 
est approach to the true folk-song that we have in 
America. 


Foster’s real life, like that of Edgar Allan Poe, 
whom he resembled in some respects, and with 
whose legible handwriting there is a quite remark- 
able resemblance, remains a closed book. 


If no one else in his time knew the enduring 
quality of his songs, Foster did himself. His pride 
and his unwillingness to be regarded as a player and 
singer show that he knew his own worth and that 
he was chagrined at not being appreciated as some- 
thing more than an amateur performer and a writer 
for the minstrel troupes. 


[ 37 J 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


His closest friends or his family perhaps knew 
very little of what was going on in his soul; as he 
left his boyhood behind him he lived almost alone 
with his own thoughts. His habitual air was one of 
brooding melancholy and abstraction; he seemed 
ever to be reaching out and searching into the hid- 
den depths of the world from which he alone knew 
how to bring into light and life and expression the 
beautiful and elusive things which he found there. 


While in Pittsburgh I tried to find whether there 
was some ground for the suggestion that Foster’s 
overpowering melancholy, which cast a permanent 
shadow over him, could have come from some tragic 
event in his life, unknown to his biographers. There 
was nothing of the kind so far as I could learn. It 
seems to have been simply constitutional and tem- 
peramental. Outwardly his life flowed unevent- 
fully; he was accorded a fair measure of apprecia- 
tion and material reward as a successful popular — 
song writer. Everything that is known of his life 
conduced to a normal and sane existence. Yet the 
mood for the sad and pathetic ever mastered him 
and he seemed unable to break from it. I was told 
that he would go out to the cemetery and weep 
passionate tears over a grave for his wife, although 

his wife was still living. The theory of a great 


[ 38 ] 


Weebl N “TOREE CHORDS 


tragedy in Foster’s life was entirely discounted and 
scouted by those who ought to have known if such 
existed. 


There are few now alive who can speak with any 
personal knowledge of Foster. “Billy” Hamilton, 
the man who should have written what he knew of 
him, died without writing what he had observed, 
though he was often urged to do so. His own wife 
perhaps knew little of him. She thought he was 
wasting his time and left him because of his habits. 
In New York he would write and compose a song in 
the morning, sell it in the afternoon and spend the 
proceeds before night. 


He had the heart of a child; except for his song 
writing he never seemed able to get beyond child- 
hood, to assume his natural responsibilities and to 
grapple with the world, although he had everything 
in his favor had he wished to take his place. 


In Pittsburgh, “his bronze statue stands just in- 
side the main gateway to Highland Park and the 
sculptor Moretti has represented him sitting with 
pencil and paper ready to jot down some immortal 
melody, while below and beside him Old Uncle Ned 


strums happily on his banjo.” 


In Cincinnati no place in local history is given to 


[ 39 } 


WITHIN THREE CHORDS 


him, the only record I have seen being his name and 
address in the city directory of 1849: 


“Foster, Stephen, bookkeeper for Irwin & Foster, 
boards Mrs. Griffin.” 


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